


Not Alone (Just for Tonight)

by The_Client



Series: Scenes from an Alternate Episode IX (writing order) [5]
Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/M, Grief/Mourning, Rey is Not a Palpatine, Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker Fix-It
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-02
Updated: 2020-02-02
Packaged: 2021-02-28 07:14:04
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,347
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22529929
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/The_Client/pseuds/The_Client
Summary: A loss brings Ben and Rey together for the first time since Crait. All works in this series can be read independently, or in any order.Content warning: references Leia’s peaceful, off-screen death (prior to the beginning of the story)***“But in retrospect, I can see, the Force was hard for her. She loved Uncle Luke, but the Force would’ve kept him just beyond her understanding, out of her reach. If she’d become his apprentice she’d have been even more in his shadow than she already was, than everyone was, after the war. And I don’t think she ever came to terms withhim.She couldn’t have, the way she kept the secret for years, made Uncle Luke keep it too.“So she declined to be trained. Showed reverence for the Force, but kept it at arm’s length ... if she wouldn’t teach you, it’s because she’d convinced herself she had nothing to teach. Had made of sure of it.“Then there was me. I think I was a worst-case scenario, even before … everything. If she thought … the way I am, any part of it, was down to something she’d done, then she must have been afraid the same thing could happen with you. Not because of you, though, you see?”
Relationships: Kylo Ren/Rey, Leia Organa & Ben Solo | Kylo Ren, Rey/Ben Solo | Kylo Ren
Series: Scenes from an Alternate Episode IX (writing order) [5]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1600099
Comments: 2
Kudos: 16





	Not Alone (Just for Tonight)

The memorial service is at dusk. Chewie puts in an appearance early in the proceedings, howls his grief before retreating to the _Falcon_ ; with his age and history, no one dares remark on his departure.

Rey isn’t so lucky. Eyes linger on her, darting away when she meets them – the eyes of near-strangers, mostly, despite her months on the Resistance base. If _the Jedi_ did not attend, if she left early, they’d be affronted, mystified, _frightened_ , whispering to one another about what might be wrong until panicked rumors permeated the camp.

So she stays, until the speeches and toasts are done, until the crowd – still pitifully small to be called such – disperses into clumps that drift lazily toward the barracks. Then she squeezes Finn’s shoulder, thanking him for standing beside her through the interminable ceremony, and tells him she’s headed to the jungle. _No, go be with Poe. I’_ _m_ _fine, I just need to be alone for awhile. You know nothing in the jungle’s a danger to me._

***

She’d been off on a minor mission, piloting a battered transport to pick up a clandestine load of sidearms from a planet called Kijimi, when she’d felt the sudden _absence_ . Upon returning to Ajan Kloss, she’d immediately cast about in the Force for Chewie. But the _Falcon_ had been gone, no doubt on a mission not unlike her own. So she’d checked on Finn – in the command hut with Dameron, as she’d expected – then headed into the jungle, to pour her dissonant emotions into physical toil.

She’d long since set up several obstacle courses in the challenging terrain around the base, combining exercises depicted in the Jedi texts with ideas gleaned from Finn’s trooper training, and from ex-New Republic commando types whose acquaintance he’d cultivated on the base. (He’d tried to introduce her to them, but it was too awkward: she’s not a person to be befriended, but _the Jedi_ . Their eyes follow her everywhere she goes, waiting for her to do something miraculous, to _save them._ )

She’d thrown herself into a course, calling on both her hard-won physical strength and the Force to scale trees, vault across chasms, engage the battered training droid Chewie had lent her from the _Falcon_. At the midpoint she must retrieve an item – a scrap of red ribbon, today – hung far out of reach of ordinary mortals. She’d speared it with the staff she’d carried since Jakku, because Skywalker’s lightsaber still lay in pieces in her work shed. She’d stuffed the ribbon under her belt, thinking with habitual frugality to re-use it later, and trekked reluctantly back to the base.

She’s never lived in such close quarters with so many beings, yet felt so isolated, especially when Finn and Chewie are busy or elsewhere. Dameron at least isn’t overawed by her, and Finn adores him. But she finds his cockiness abrasive, and his thirst to have her as an ally in his politico-military maneuvering is a bit too obvious. Rose Tico, the friend Finn made in Rey’s absence, is a beam of sunlight in the Force. But Rey can’t help but feel inadequate in her failure to reflect that fierce, untainted goodness back.

Most of all, she can’t help but (selfishly, surely) dwell on the absence of anyone she can talk to about the Force – about her struggles with the texts and with the broken saber; about the constant mental pressure of her compatriots’ expectations. Finn, endlessly patient, listens and paraphrases and reflects her feelings back to her, even when he doesn’t understand – but that doesn’t change the fact that _he doesn’t understand_. General Organa … had at least been a possibility. One now foreclosed. There was no one.

(Except for the obvious, the impossible.)

***

Now she flicks on her handlight and hikes into the jungle, choosing an uneven and mostly uphill path, again striving to smother her buzzing brain in physical exhaustion. She’s catching her breath with her back to a tree, performing an isometric pull against the red ribbon wrapped around her knuckles, when the familiar whirring fills her ears.

It’s happened often enough since Crait, despite her attempts to resist it. It isn’t his fault, she knows; neither of them can control when the Force chooses to connect them. So she hasn’t berated him, nor tried to attack him. She’s simply turned her back, refused to look, refused to speak, closed her mind as best she can. The first time, he’d whispered her name – _Rey –_ in a voice that had nearly broken her resolve. But since then he’s respected her wishes, or perhaps called her bluff; ignored her, in any case, as fiercely she ignores him.

Tonight, though, their usual routine just feels too heartless.

“I’m sorry for your loss,” she says stiffly.

“You don’t have to say anything.”

His voice is hoarse, but calm; she realizes she’d expected histrionic drama, or at least sneering sullenness. She allows herself a sidelong glance. He’s standing with one shoulder against some vertical surface she can’t see, the arm bent up so he can half-bury his face in it. Still swathed in layers of black, even his hands covered, hair long enough to overlap his high collar – but he hasn’t replaced the mask.

“It’s okay. We can talk. Just for tonight.”

“Alright. I mean … thank you.”

She feels his eyes on her, feels them drop away when she doesn’t look back.

“May I ask how it happened? I only felt her … disappear.”

“Peacefully enough, according to the medics. Her health had been declining since … after D’Qar. The physical stress she experienced.”

Why is she euphemising, dancing around the truth? She knows it wasn’t him that blew the bridge out of the _Raddus;_ she’d experienced the memory when they’d _touched_ that night on Ahch-To, though she’d had to glean the context from her Resistance compatriots later. But he’d led the squadron that did the deed, changed his resolve too late to countermand their orders. He hardly deserves protection from reminders of his crimes.

“I see.” She can hear that the implications aren’t lost on him. Then, unexpectedly, “It’s hit you hard. You’d grown close to her?”

“No.”

Then, because that one word sounds so cold – because it’s just one night, and he isn’t actually here, so it isn’t _real_ – because she’s had no one to tell for so long, she finds herself continuing.

“She hugged me,” she says, “the first time we met. Before she ever said a word to me, she _hugged_ me, and you know – you _know –”_

“I know,” he agrees, saving her from having to find a dignified way to say, _you know if there’s anything that can override my common sense, my self-preservation instincts – that can permeate me with filaments of hope so brittle, so all-pervasive, the loss of it might shatter me – it’s a hug from a kriffing parental figure._

“And later, after Crait, she told me I had everything I needed, like she _believed_ in me.” It had meant so much, after Skywalker’s bad faith, after everything.

“Then … nothing. Her mind was always guarded.” Rey hadn’t _really_ been tempted to breach it without permission – she wasn’t that person – but the thought had occurred, troubling to her nonetheless. “She’d include me in strategy meetings, but when I wanted to talk about the Force, about being _the Jedi_ , there was always something else she needed to discuss, somewhere else she had to be. Until I’d remember, I’d _think_ I remembered, that hug _,_ those words, and … and …”

“And you’d start to wonder if you’d imagined those moments,” he says into her struggling silence. “To wish they’d never happened, real or imagined, because it would be easier.”

The headiness, the _relief_ of being _understood_ brings tears to her eyes – the first since she felt the General’s passage. She could never say such things to anyone on the Resistance base, of course; they’d all been raised to _worship_ General Organa. Except for Finn, her fellow outsider, who was wonderful; but it was precisely _because_ he was so wonderful that she couldn’t reduce herself in his eyes by expressing such shameful, such _ungrateful_ thoughts.

“They wanted me to speak at the memorial” – kriffing _Dameron_ had wanted her to read a speech _he’d_ written, actually – “but I didn’t know her. I don’t think she even liked me.”

“Oh, Rey. That wasn’t it.”

She bristles at the implied denial of her experience. “You’re not here. You don’t know.”

A bark of laughter, that sounds like it _hurts_ _._ “Don’t I?

“Look, my mother … I didn’t realize when I was a kid, I mean, _I was a kid_ , even nice normal kids aren’t expected to understand this kind of thing, especially when the adults involved won’t talk to them –” His voice cracks and he stops, shifts his back to the invisible wall, covers his face with gloved hands for a moment before pushing them back through his hair.

“But in retrospect, I can see, the Force was _hard_ for her. She loved Uncle Luke, but the Force would’ve kept him just beyond her understanding, out of her reach. If she’d become his apprentice she’d have been even more in his shadow than she already was, than everyone was, after the war. And I don’t think she ever came to terms with _him_. Her father. She couldn’t have, the way she kept the secret for years, made Uncle Luke keep it too.

“So she declined to be trained. Showed reverence for the Force, but kept it at arm’s length. She couldn’t lose the raw ability” – fleeting impressions of the _Raddus,_ of hysterical strength awakened in extremity – “but if she wouldn’t teach you, it’s because she’d convinced herself she had nothing to teach. Had made of sure of it.

“Then there was me. I think I was a worst-case scenario, even before … everything. They used to joke that I was a surprise. I doubt she ever meant to have a biological child, to risk it being Force-sensitive, let alone being like _him_. If she thought … the way I am, any part of it, was down to something she’d done, then she must have been afraid the same thing could happen with you. Not _because_ of you, though, you see?

“And on top of that, all the people and plots that must have been clamoring for her attention, leaving no time for you. It was always like that. I’m sure she meant well, she always did. But … the situation was untenable. Long before you came into it.”

She wants to accept the reassurance. Wants to weep openly with the relief of it, but doesn’t want to show such weakness; and besides, the absurdity of the situation, of his comforting _her,_ has struck her. _Maker, listen to me! What right have I to complain that she didn’t coddle me like I wanted? She had a private army and a vital political movement to run; I’m a grown woman,_ _thoroughly proven to be_ _able to take care of myself; she wasn’t_ my _mother._

She’d believed her thoughts to be guarded, but he says quietly, “It’s alright. I hardly have a better claim on her than you, all things considered.”

For the first time since Crait, she allows herself to really look at him. He’s always looked like he hasn’t slept in years (and she knows, from that moment in the firelight on Ahch-To, that it isn’t far from the truth _)._ But she swears the effect is more pronounced now, the scar starker against paler, gray-tinged skin. His face is thinner than she remembered; his elaborate clothing conceals the rest, but she thinks the long layers drape off him in a way they didn’t before.

She’d told herself after the _Supremacy_ that she was done wasting her time, her emotions. But under the circumstances, she decides, it’s worth a try.

“Are you happy where you are? Satisfied, being in charge?”

A hoarse laugh. “No.”

“Then leave it.”

“You know I can’t.”

She pushes away from her tree and takes a step toward him, squeezing the red ribbon in her fingers for courage. “I _don’t_ know. Why not?”

“She’s gone _._ Any chance I ever had of … going back, is gone with her. If I run, the Resistance and the Order both will hunt me to the ends of the galaxy.”

She keeps moving, a calculated invasion of his personal space. There’s a wall at his back, wherever he is; he can only step sidelong away from her.

“So _vanish._ Like Skywalker did.”

“I don’t think I can.”

“Why not?”

Something very hard to look at flashes across his face, before he schools his expression with visible effort.

“I couldn’t take it.” Barely audible. “Being alone.”

Despite her resolve, and the anger that’s festered since the _Supremacy_ , her heart twists in that moment. _You’re not alone,_ she wants to say. _Let me help. We’ll find a way, a bearable solution._

But her next step degenerates into a stumble, as the ground seems to morph beneath her feet: no longer jungle mulch, but something flat and unyielding. Her knees and palms strike painfully against the surface, pierced by small hard projections. Before her is nothing but a dizzying vastness of stars.

_Rivets in_ _the seams of durasteel flooring_ _._ _A wall-sized viewport; that’s what he was leaning against_ _._ This factual grasp of her new surroundings, basic as it is, soothes her incipient panic. But his eyes have gone huge and intense in his ash-white face.

“Rey, _walk backwards._ You can’t actually _be_ here. It’s not safe for you.”

She pushes herself to her feet. _Footsteps approaching, brisk and martial. Strange minds approaching with them –_

“ _Rey!”_

She scrambles backwards.

***

When the jungle of Ajan Kloss re-asserts itself around her, she’s alone. There are snags at the knees of her calf-length pants, tiny lacerations on her palms – mostly just through the outermost layer of skin, but deep enough to seep blood in spots. An inane thought strikes: her red ribbon is gone.

The next thought is so ruefully familiar, she almost laughs out loud: _there’s no one I can talk to about this._

No one but the obvious, the impossible.


End file.
